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About Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death and already garnering extraordinary praise from some of our most respected novelists and critics, Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin's Press; Hardcover) is a stunning literary debut by Kate Moses, cofounder of Salon.com's "Mothers Who Think" Website. Capturing the haunted last months of Sylvia Plath's life and the painful creation of her legendary Ariel poems, Wintering is a deeply felt novel about artistry, marriage, motherhood, and self-understanding.
"Fiction, guided by the educated imagination, can lead where mere chronicle dare not venture," states Peter Davison, friend and editor of Plath and editor of the best-known biography of Plath, Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame. "Kate Moses knows everything on record about Sylvia Plath, but her novelist imagination takes us into those crevices of Plath's mind where no one else has ever penetrated. Her novel evokes the special qualities of the wife, the mother, the poet, the woman whose intensity of experience somehow overwhelmed her senses, her sanity, but never her language. No other version of those mysterious last months before Sylvia Plath's suicide goes so far to restore the life of the poet, the woman, whom I knew."
Wintering finds Sylvia Plath on her own with her two young children, elated -- despite the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes -- by a move to London and her newly completed poetry manuscript. Yet within days, her resolve is tested. She and her children fall ill. She crosses paths with Ted's lover, and when she gives her new manuscript to Ted to read, she is deeply shaken by his reaction: He is not angry about her vicious mythologizing of their breakup, but stunned into silence by sadness and artistic respect. Realizing her poetic triumph has come at a terrible cost, Sylvia teeters at the edge of an emotional precipice. She sends Ted on a mission through England's worst snowstorm in decades for items that she has imbued with the totemic power to put things rights -- apples, honey, and red curtains left behind at her country home. As Wintering concludes, Sylvia clings to the one thing she believes will save her: hope.
"Kate Moses brings to the hard facts of Plath's biography a powerful imagination and a remarkable acuity of vision," hails MacArthur Award-winning novelist Joanna Scott. "The result is a beautiful, tender novel that shows us how art is made and, in the process, illuminates the mysteries of the mind in fine detail."
A novel of near-hypnotic empathy and unsparing insight, Wintering marks the arrival of a powerful and original voice on the American literary scene.
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Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
About Wintering
